FIRM SAYS U.S. URGED COVERT PLOTS

• Document Type: CREST
• Collection: General CIA Records
• Document Number (FOIA) /ESDN (CREST): CIA-RDP90-00965R000302540001-0
• Release Decision: RIPPUB
• Original Classification: K
• Document Page Count: 3
• Document Creation Date: December 22, 2016
• Document Release Date: September 26, 2012
• Sequence Number: 1
• Publication Date: April 26, 1987
• Content Type: OPEN SOURCE

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PHILADELPHIA INQUIRER
26 April 1987
Firm says
U.S. urged
covert plots
Khomeini
called target
of one scheme
Richard J. Meadows
Peregrine's president
47 By Frank Greve,
Matthew Purdy
and Mark Fazlollah
Inquirer Washington Bureau
WASHINGTON ? Pentagon intelli-
gence specialists urged a private
Texas company to mount several se-
cret operations deemed too sensitive
for direct U.S. government involve-
ment, including the sale of arms for
an aborted 1982 plot by Iranian mili-
tary officers to assassinate the Aya-
tollah Ruhollah Khomeini, accord-
ing to founders of the firm.
The company officials said in in-
terviews that they also received
clearance from Pentagon officials
for vigilante-style schemes to nab
and kill drug smugglers in Peru;
Honduras, Belize and the Caribbean.
They said they also were encouraged
to arm and train Nicaraguan contra
rebel forces and elite military com-
mando units in El Salvador, Hondu-
ras and Peru.
"Our job was to do the things that
the government could not be seen to
be doing," said Gary S. Howard,
40, founder of Pere:rine lnternatiiaj
ssociates o lEY "Our deal was
t a pnvate sector could handle
lots of security missions abroad and
American boAXQUIdn't get killed
or, if they did, there'd be no fuss."
Peregrine's executives say they h?
lieve their firm was the model for
what became the Reagan administra-
tion's broad policy of carrying out
politically unacceptable covert oper-
ations "off the books," by using pri;
vete companies. Congressional inves-
tigators say they believe it was this
pattern of using retired military per-
sonnel in secret contracts that fi-
nally exploded in the Iran-contra
scandal.
No explicit contracts governed the
relationship between Peregrine and
the Pentagon. Peregrine executives
said each side understood it needed
the other: the Pentagon needed an
independent company to accomplish
its policy objectives and Peregrine
needed the tacit support of the U.S.
government to carry out covert oper-
ations abroad.
Foreign governments would pay
for most operations, possibly using
U.S. military aid, according to Pere-
grine's plans. In some circumstances.
U.S. government agencies, such as
the Customs Service, would pay
Peregrine.
Often, Peregrine operated like a
private CIA, offering counterterror-
ist and counterinsurgency assistance
to foreign countries. For example, in
1982 Peregrine designed a comman-
do training program for Honduras
that included instruction in urban
assault tactics, restraint techniques,
interrogation, demolition and sniper
marksmanship, according to a pro-
spectus of the program. ?
Howard and his partner, Ronald R.
Tucker, explained their company's
history in lengthly interviews. They
are the first commando entrepre-
neurs to reveal their secret arrange-
ments with the government. They
said they decided to speak publicly, -
in part because they have not been
paid $1.2.5 million they said the U.S.
Customs Service owes them.
Peregrine officials said that few of
their projects were carried to com-
pletion, but that they met "all the
time" in Washington with Pentagon
intelligence specialists to discuss
missions the government wanted
accomplished.
Work for the CIA
Among those with whom they met
were retired Army Lt. Gen. Samuel V.
Wilson, a former director of the De-
fense Intelligence Agency and cur-
rently an adviser to the secretary of
defense on ? special operations, and
Lt. Col. Wayne E. Long, a senior offi-
cer of a top-secret military intelli-
gence unit called the Foreign
Operations Group.
Previously published accounts
have identified Long's unit as part of
the Army's Intelligence Support Ac-
tivity, which is said to work with the
CIA to provide intelligence, deep
cover and laundered money for se-
cret U.S. military missions abroad.
"Wilson and Long told us what we
could do and what we couldn't do,"
said Howard, a deputy sheriff in cen-
tral Texas since Peregrine folded in
1984. "They'd give us sanction from
Mother. We wouldn't do anything
without sanction from Mother."
Howard defined "sanction from
Mother" as "an OK from State, CIA
and Defense giving their tacit ap-
proval, their assurance that they
wouldn't stand in our way."
Howard and other participants
said active-duty Special Forces per-
sonnel on leave, as well as personnel
from the elite Army counterterrorist
unit called Delta Force, assisted Per-
egrine in the plot against the
ayatollah.
In a brief interview, Long said that
he knew Peregrine and some of its
officials and that he knew of the
firm's efforts to interdict narcotics
in Central America. He declined to
elaborate on any aspect of his deal-
ings with Peregrine without ap-
proval from the director of the
Defense Intelligence Agency or the
Army's deputy chief of staff for intel-
ligence. That approval was not given.
'Personal advice'
Wilson, in a telephone interview,
confirmed that he had met with sev-
eral Peregrine officials but mini-
mized any role he may have played
with the company. He said he gave
only "personal advice" to Pere-
grine's president.
Maj. Philip Soucy, an Army spokes-
man, said late last week that a search
of Army records for information
about Peregrine had been under way
for several days and was continuing..
"We haven't found anything yet," he
said.
Like other international arms deal-
ers and go-betweens involved in the
Iran-contra affair, Howard and Tuck-
er are flamboyant, conspiratorial,
colorful and controversial figures.
For that reason, multiple confirma-
tions of their allegations were
sought through Customs documents,
State Department records, memos
and letters from the company itself.
FBI, Customs and military officials
also were interviewed. In some cases,
however, multiple confirmations
were not possible because' the only
knowledgeable person Lt. Col.
Long, for example ? was unable to
speak freely because of the classified
nature of his work. ,
Company employment charts show
that Peregrine drew most of its man-
power from a pool of retired Special
Forces personnel familiar with se-
cret military operations, most of
them veterans of the elite Delta
Force counterterrorist unit. ?
Howard, 38, and Tucker, 39; a pair
of tobacco-chewing 'West Texas law-
men, worked their way into that net-
work in 1981.
Continued
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Free-lance agents
Since 1979, they said, they had
worked as free-lance undercover
agents for the Customs Service infil-
trating illegal international arms
deals and passing along information
to the Customs officials. As a reward
for each success, they received a
moiety ? a percentage of the seized
property.
Backed by about $1,650,000 in com-
missions and moieties, most of the
money coming from the sale of a
seized Boeing 707, Peregrine was in-
corporated in 1981 with Howard as
chairman and Tucker as secretary-
treasurer. They said their intention
was to use proceeds from undercover
arms deals to ransom a U.S. prisoner
of war out of Vietnam, a cause in
which they had long been active.
But the company's mission
changed in December 1981, when
two government officials that How-
ard and Tucker knew from Customs
work introduced them to retired
Army Special Forces Maj. Richard J.
Meadows, a highly decorated Viet-
nam War commando.
Meadows, whom they hired as Per-
egrine's president, had made News-
week's cover after slipping into
Tehran in 1980 and, with little more
than an Irish brogue as a disguise,
provided key on-site intelligence for
the Iran hostage rescue raid that
failed. State Department records con-
firm that Meadows did indeed go to
work at Peregrine.
Meadows arranged for Howard and
Tucker to meet his friend and men-
tor, Lt. Gen. Wilson, former director
of the Defense Intelligence Agency,
in a Holiday Inn room in Rosslyn,
Va., a Washington suburb. At the
meeting. Howard and Tucker said.
they told Wilson their plan for get-
ting a prisoner out of Vietnam. They
said Wilson had other ideas for the
fledgling paramilitary company.
"Wilson told us our job was to do
the things that the government
could not be seen to be doing," Tuck--
er recalled.
In time, the plans laid out at the
Rosslyn meeting crystallized. Pere-
grine would become a private arm of
Army intelligence, training foreign
military groups and developing anti-
terrorism plans under Meadows' di-
rection, according to Tucker and
Howard. The two said they would use
Peregrine's manpower to pursue un-
dercover arms and narcotics work.
Peregrine was modeled on a Lon-
don firm that Tucker and Howard
had come across in arms deals:
Keeni-Meeni Services Ltd. Keeni-
Meeni ? a Swahili word describing a
snake's movement through grass ?
employed retired British Special Air
Service commandos in unofficially
endorsed operations where an offi-
cial British presence would have
been embarrassing. If caught, Keeni-
Meeni's highly skilled operatives
were on their own.
"Intelligence people were so ex-
cited. There had never been any-
thing like that in the United States,"
Howard said.
Of the skilled covert paramilitary
operators in the United States, How-
ard said: "Peregrine had the cream
of the crop."
Former National Security Council
aide Oliver L. North apparently ad-
mired Keeni-Meeni, too; two Keeni-
Meeni pilots served 90-day stints
with the contra arms airdrop opera-
tion exposed in October, according to
other participants. In a contra aid
organizational sketch found in
North's safe, the initials "KMS" ap-
pear among the operational
elements.
Howard and Tucker said they
found the government to be an eager
partner in their endeavors.
Shortly after the Washington or-
ganizational meeting, Lt. Col. Long
provided a list of countries in which
Peregrine could and could not oper-
ate, according to Tucker, Howard
and other former Peregrine
employees.
Bolivia was off-limits, they said,
because the United States already
had covert operations in place there.
Belize, Chile, Costa Rica, El Salvador,
Guatemala, Honduras; Nicaragua,
Morocco, Nigeria, Paraguay, Peru, So-
malia and Sudan were encouraged.
"Sure, we were used as a cover for
the US. government," Tucker said.
"We knew Meadows reported to Wil-
son and Long. There was no doubt
Gary and I were going to be bastard-
ized stepchildren, but we didn't
mind being manipulated as long as
we knew what we were doing."
Perigrine's mission was shaped by
two retired Army Special Forces ma-
jors Meadows hired to help him run
the company ? Charles Odorizzi, for-
mer director of selection and train-
ing for Delta Force, and William
Patton, a Latin America specialist.
For operations, Peregrine offered
Special Forces and Delta personnel
$30,000 a year. That compared favor-
ably to the CIA's standing nffer
Delta Force retiree _s of $21000 for
work with Alifiiin?tuiriith-
-viist- AM-a:"
eregritie used both retired and
active duty personnel on leave as
what Howard calls "guns" "guys
who had no qualms about blowing
people away, which is real ftne for
protective-type work."
No killing was done, Howald said,
"but our idea was to be like-Delta and
not leave anybody alive. Irwe found
communist cadres or terrorist cells
in Honduras or wherever, we'd elim-
inate them, except for the people we
wanted to interrogate or bring back
for display."
Perhaps the most dramatic mission
that Long and Wilson urged Pere-
grine to become involved in, accord-
ing to Howard and Tucker, was a plot
by Iranian military officers to over-
throw Khomeini.
Certain details of the plot are con-
tained in a September 1982 internal
Customs Service report on an investi-
gation of an illicit arms sale.
That record shows that in January
1982 Meadows met in London with an
Iranian Air Force major named Ma?
soud Yahya. At the meeting, accord-
ing to the Customs records, Yahya
said he was looking to buy about SIOC
million in small arms, explosives.
ammunition and bulletproof vests tc
be used in a "military coup in Iran.'
According to the records, Yahya
also sought "to obtain technical ad-
vice and assistance from the United
States government" for the coup.
Yahya's moderate faction intended
to kilrthe-ayatollah's palace guard
and assassinate Khomeini, then
sweep aside his supporters with a
force-of 4,000 pro-Western military
men, Howard and Tucker said.
After utofiting in London with Ye-
hya, Mouton went to Washington tc
discuss the plot with Long and Wil-
son, Peregrine .officials said. "Dick
told us they wanted to do it," Howard
said. "They (Long and Wilson I
wanted to let this one go through,
and told us, 'Whatever you need, let'
get the money and let's go.'"
To finance the plot, Peregrine wee
to receive S120 million from Yahya.
The money, which Peregrine offi-
cials mere told would come from
holdings of the late shah of Iran, wat
stored in a vault in New York. '
Howard, Tucker, Meadows and
eight or nine other men ? including
three active-duty military personnel
whom Meadows obtained from Fort
Bragg ? spent 21 days in April 198:
at the Grand Hyatt Hotel in Manhat-
tan waiting for the Iranians to arrive
with their money, acCording to How-
ard and Tucker. Two other Peregrine.
executives also said in interviews
that astire-duty personnel from Fort
Braggspirticipated.
In tliecourse of their three-week
stay, tpeyt tan up a $77,000 hotel bill
One tht-men met a Pan Am stew
ardesi Whbm he later married: But
Yahy4 neyer showed up. The deal
collar
Mo precisely, it was interrupted.
Whil at the Hyatt, Howard said.
Mead4ws received a call from Long
urging tbs:t Peregrine help free a
Hondtran airliner that had been
seized.with 48 aboard in Tegucigalpa
by leftist hijackers. Five Peregrine
commandos, led by Meadows and
Odorizzi, responded immediately,
Continua!
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Their arrival in Tegucigalpa
aboard a chartered Learjet im-
pressed Honduran military authort
ties. So did Meadows' plan to storm;
the hijacked plane. Although the sei-
zure eventually was settled by nego-
tiation, Peregrine retained a chit of
gratitude from the Honduran
government.
Free training
Meadows, Odorizzi and Patton im.
mediately. sought to exploit it. They
offered free firearms training at a
military -range. They proposed to
train an elite Honduran military
commando unit, called the CORRAs
in counterterrorism and counterin-
surgency techniques. And they pro-
posed : to Honduran Gen. Walter
Lopez e plan to interdict drug smug
glers ind split their seized property
50-50: Xith the Honduran
government.
Money'Proved the stumbling
block.13dtlf Peregrine Ond Honduran
officials figured it would come from
U.S. military aid, Instead, the CIA
steppe; imand, according to docu-
menti used active-duty Special
Forced personnel from Fort Bragg,
posing as civilians, to train Hondu-
ran Mmandos in counterinsur-
gency "aechniques, ?
Howprd and Tucker say that Mead-
ows and Odorizzi offered similar pre*
posals:Wherever they could In Latin
America. The strongest interest, they
said, came from Peru, where'a leftist
insurgkncy called the Shining Pat*
was ceportedly taking protectiojii
Ili
money, from rural cocaine growers,
Meadotvs and Odorizzi also though
they cbtritt supplyt,Pers with/ spa -
parts for-Eastern bloc military WO
ware, inementos of a dashed flirta4
tion wjth the Soviet-Uniot
On Oct. 26, 1982, amid thebtOlituillei
Peruvian deal, Meadows quit, for rea4
sons trot remain mysterious.. He tot*
subordinates that he walld organize,
a new!company within 60 days and
find work for themill Latin-America.1
Odoridi resigned days later:But the;
new company never mate;tailzed. ? .,.I
A memo they left behind says of
the Peruvian proposal: "Sky's the
Meadocvs in a telephone inter-
view, ;tressed that while many of the
operattons may have been discussed.
"nothing:materialized.- He de-
scribed Long as "a friend and ad-
viser 074 I would ask every now
and ttlpir to sound me out on some-
thing atieperhaps assist me in mak-
ing cohtacts."
He described Gen. Wilson as "the
best sounding board in the world. He
could say this is good or this is bad
and pass information on if needed, or
say hold off and back off."
One important message to Mead-
ows and other Peregrine officials,
they said, was that the Reagan ad-
ministration, early on, had decided
to assign much of the government's
covert and clandestine activity to the
military, rather than the CIA. '
The Defense Intelligence Agency,
for example, which was created in
1961 to-oversee the services' separate
military intelligence units, also
stepped up its "extraordinary mili-
tary attiVities" to include cOunter-
terrorism and counterinsurgency.
Wilson's observation, according to
Howard, was that "The DIA was pick-
ing up 90 Jercent of the CIA's work.
The MA was going to become the
new MIA leave the CIA out there
1 take the public .ticks."
Declassified in Part - Sanitized Copy Approved for Release 2012/09/26: CIA-RDP90-00965R000302540001-0